dbus-deviation is a project for parsing D-Bus introspection XML and processing it in various ways. Its main tool is dbus-interface-diff, which calculates the difference between two D-Bus APIs for the purpose of checking for API breaks. This functionality is also available as a Python module, dbusdeviation.
A second Python module, dbusapi, is provided for parsing D-Bus introspection XML to produce an AST representing a D-Bus interface.
dbus-deviation’s API is currently unstable and is likely to change wildly.
dbus-deviation can be used as a utility program or as a Python library.
The utility programs:
-
dbus-interface-diff: Check for differences between two versions of the same D-Bus API and print details of each difference. It can check for problems with forwards and backwards compatibility, as well as general informational differences.
Example: dbus-interface-diff
com.example.Interface1.xml \ # old version of the interface com.example.Interface2.xml # new version of the interface -
dbus-interface-vcs-helper: This is a helper program designed to be used by dbus-deviation.mk.
As a library, the core object is an InterfaceParser, allowing a D-Bus API to be parsed and represented as an AST. See the API documentation for more explanation and examples.
This is a Makefile snippet which should be copied into your project, added to git, and the following two lines included in your top-level Makefile.am:
dbus_api_xml_files = list of D-Bus interface XML files
-include $(top_srcdir)/dbus-deviation.mk
Do not add it to EXTRA_DIST. It is designed to work from git checkouts only.
Then run:
make dbus-deviation-mk-install
to set up the API signature database. This assumes that your project defines D-Bus interfaces in XML files, and does not generate them at runtime.
Finally, copy pre-push.hook to .git/hooks/pre-push and ensure it’s executable. This script will automatically update the API signature database when a new release tag is pushed to the git remote.
There is currently no streamlined support for projects which generate D-Bus interfaces at runtime.
dbus-deviation.mk defines the following rules:
- dist-dbus-api-compatibility (a dependency of dist-hook)
- check-dbus-api-compatibility (a dependency of check-local)
- dbus-deviation-mk-install (never triggered automatically)
- argparse
- lxml
For fun, dbus-deviation uses the following services to do continuous integration and gather build statistics:
- https://travis-ci.org/pwithnall/dbus-deviation
- https://landscape.io/github/pwithnall/dbus-deviation
- https://coveralls.io/r/pwithnall/dbus-deviation
- https://codecov.io/github/pwithnall/dbus-deviation
dbus-deviation is licensed under the LGPL version 2.1 (or, at your option, any later version). See COPYING for more details.
dbus-deviation versions 0.4.0 and earlier were licensed under the choice of the Academic Free License version 2.1, or the GNU General Public License version 2 (or, at your option, any later version). This is the same license as D-Bus itself. Version 0.5.0 was relicensed to LGPLv2.1+ as it’s a more standard license with less ambiguity about its implications.
Bug reports and patches should be sent via GitHub or Gitlab:
Philip Withnall philip@tecnocode.co.uk https://tecnocode.co.uk/dbus-deviation/